A Girl and a Gun: Los Angeles, via Hollywood

January 11, 2005

Los Angeles, via Hollywood

2003 was a great year for documentaries: My Architect, Spellbound, Stone Reader, Fog of War, and Capturing the Friedmans were all fine films. Last year provided little beyond Demme’s The Agronomist, although now I would include among 2004’s best Los Angeles Plays Itself. I missed its New York theatrical release at the Film Forum, so when it showed up at a second-run house in Greenwich Village a few days ago, I was determined not to miss it again. I’m glad I didn’t, for all the reservations I have about it.

As title suggests, it’s about the role of Los Angeles in films, almost exclusively American films, a subject intrinsically worth going into and one I find especially intriguing since I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s and ‘50s. The film was from Los Angeles resident, filmmaker, and teacher (at Cal Arts) Thom Andersen and it’s full of strong, interesting, sometimes peculiar opinions. (The first person narrative, written by Andersen, is actually spoken by a friend and fellow filmmaker, Encke King.) Money problems forced him to shoot much of it on video, and the transfer to 35 mm has not been without significant distortions and fuzziness. It’s long, at just a whisker under three hours, and it’s almost entirely composed of film clips—no talking heads—and the narration is spoken in a flat, uninflected drone, so there’s a risk of some tedium. Andersen has a tendency to make a point convincingly with a few examples, then to hammer the point home with a fistful of similar examples. Personally, I could do without this; I’d prefer Andersen grant me the presumption of some intelligence and concede that I could have gotten the point earlier.

Early on, he makes what sounds like it may be his principal argument: that the Los Angeles almost always represented on film is not the one any observant resident would recognize. He documents this with such points as geographical confusions (or ignorance, or distortions) and radical departures from reality such as using fake telephone numbers (e.g. those with a 555 prefix) or people of modest means living in posh quarters. These illustrations, of which there are (too) many, are of course standard Hollywood laziness or contempt for the audience or risk avoidance (if we give a “real” number, someone will copy it and start calling it and we’ll get sued). Remember when all Hollywood movies used fake money instead of real US currency? But is there anything valuable to be learned from these examples?

It took me a while to regain some confidence in Andersen after these preliminaries, but in time he launches into his three main sections: “The City as Background,” “The City as Character,” “The City as Subject.” Although some of the same tendencies show up now and then, things get a good deal more absorbing. It turns out that Andersen is a reasonably ardent advocate of the theories of cinematic reality propounded after World War II by André Bazin (whose name is not mentioned in the film), the French film journalist and theorist, godfather to many of the New Wave directors. Bazin believed in the primacy of the realistic image, and while his views are of course the source of a half century of spirited debate, they are defensible. While I have respect for Bazin’s views, I also think that Andersen is correct when he concedes that “films aren’t about places, they’re about stories.” Stories are by their very nature fictional, we have been accepting the idea of poetic license for a couple of millennia, and liberties must sometimes be taken to produce the glorious results in which stories can result. (I recommend The Iliad and The Odyssey to skeptics.) In any event, Andersen would have been better served by making those views of Bazin’s, and his own by adoption and refinement, explicit. What happens when people fake things in a movie? How does it affect our response? A good deal of the introductory segment would have played much better, in my judgment, with just a touch of theoretical groundwork—and Andersen can be good at making complicated explanations clear, when he puts his mind to it.

Those three sections are, for the most part and with some reservations, first-rate work. When Andersen tones down his disapproval for common distortions and gets into, especially, character and subject, his film sings. I particularly liked his treatment of downtown Los Angeles, which he finds so much more interesting than the city of the hills and the beaches, and his chronicle of Bunker Hill and its fortunes over the last sixty years is first-rate. When I was in high school, I read in the newspapers about downtown, widely thought to be a den of iniquity; Bunker Hill, dismissed as skid row; the huge black and Latino neighborhoods nearby of which I’d only the vaguest sense, as in the mythology of the so-called Zoot Suit riots of 1943; and all the bars and b-girls in the neighborhood. Consequently, when I borrowed one of my parents’ cars on a weekend saying I was going to drive to Hollywood for a movie, I usually went downtown to see what was going on: a movie, to be sure, but usually an old burlesque film or perhaps a nudist “documentary”; cruising past the doors of bars with b-girls; getting the feel of Bunker Hill. Hollywood was phenomenally boring by comparison.

Andersen also does some revisionist work on “acknowledged classics,” especially Chinatown (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997). Again, it’s easy to take exception; but Andersen has done his homework on the distortions of reality involved, they have political significance, and they’re among the most stimulating and provocative parts of his film.

I was a little surprised that it took so long for Andersen to get to what I thought was his best point: it seems to be impossible to make a movie about Los Angeles without including the police. The story of postwar Los Angeles is a story about police, and long before Rodney King, or even the Watts riots of 1965. The Los Angeles police ran the town, regulated (by supervising) the rackets, and served as a paramilitary force which kept the African-Americans and Mexican immigrants in their place. Not much has changed. Andersen gives all this scrupulous attention.

Los Angeles Plays Itself is really the longest piece of film criticism I have encountered in some time. Like all good representatives of the genre, it’s spirited, debatable, and gets you to thinking, even to wanting to see some things again, or even anew. (Andersen must have seen everything, and by some of the clips he provides, I’d have to see it’s also possible to say, there isn’t anything he won’t see. A dedicated man.) That, for my money, is what film criticism is all about, as opposed to providing views with which nobody can take exception.

January 11, 2005 at 10:24 AM | Permalink

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A Girl and a Gun

January 11, 2005

Los Angeles, via Hollywood

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